These Foolish Things
by Enitharmon
Summary: Elaine Parry's story in her own words


_Disclaimer: the characters herein belong not to me but to Philip Pullman._

_The song_ These Foolish Things_, by Jack Strachey and Harry Link, is quoted without permission_

**These Foolish Things**

_A tinkling piano in the next apartment   
Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant_

The piano was the hardest thing. It didn't tinkle. Rather it jarred and jangled through the wall, in the little sitting room with its chintzy chairs and brass ornaments, where Mrs Cooper would leave me with a pot of tea and a pile of Readers Digests. The piano would start to jangle from the end of the afternoon after the schools came out and kept going well into the evening. It reminded me of the days when William would come home from school and shut himself away for an hour's piano practice. Poor lad, his heart was never in it. I suspect he only stuck at it as long as he did to please me. I can't say I was surprised when he stopped.

It was different with John. He loved his old piano. It had stood in his grandparents' front parlour when he was little, lovingly polished but little played, and it was his delight to climb onto the stool, open the lid and pick out tunes with one finger. His parents had been quick to spot his latent talent and paid for lessons for him. He didn't give up, he threw his whole self into it. At the piano he excelled, just as he excelled at everything he attempted.

It's such a clich‚, the girl going for a soldier. But that's exactly what I did. We met at university, where I was studying English and he was doing Geophysics. We didn't have much to do with the scientists, mostly, but John was different. There was something of the Thirties about him, something old-fashioned and romantic. His studies were being funded by the Navy, so that set him apart from the other students and he didn't mix with them in the usual student pubs or smoke dope in the coffee bars. He just sat across from me in the Union refectory one day, peered into my very soul with those intense blue eyes of his, and asked me to go dancing with him. Just like that! Not, you understand, the usual Union disco. No, this was proper dancing. At school we'd learned to do a basic waltz and quickstep as a social skill, but when John put his arms around me I found I could trip around the floor as if I had been born to it. 

Yes, I fell for my soldier all right. A more perfect man couldn't have existed. He was too good to be true, but I didn't want him not to be true. I was head-over-heels in love with him. We married as soon as we graduated. And, of course, it wasn't long before I discovered the other side of being a service wife.

It was fine at first. He was doing his doctorate at Southampton and I found a job as a teacher in Winchester. The Royal Marines funded him well, if not generously, and even with my modest teacher's salary we had a good life together. There were holidays in Italy and skiing trips to Norway, and once a year there was the Marines Ball in Dartmouth. Oh I felt like a princess on those nights! John looking gorgeous in his dress uniform and me in taffeta floating round the room in his arms to the obvious admiration, and I suspect envy, of the onlookers.

And then it had to end. The Royal Marines had paid for all this of course, and they weren't doing it for charity. They took John away on service. He was getting the airline tickets to romantic places, and I got the postcards. After a while even the postcards stopped. He was promoted to Major and it brought new responsibilities of some sort - he was vague about them, which wasn't at all like him. Now there was only a PO Box in London to write to. I missed his beautiful eyes terribly and wrote long letters to him two or three times a week. Months would go by without a reply and when one did come it was a cursory and apologetic page or two of flimsy paper. Still, when they came I would sit at the dining table reading the few lines over and over again for what comfort they held, and after dripping tears on them that smudged the writing I tucked them carefully away in the green leather writing case.

When he came home again on leave, he was changed. The moment I saw his face I felt my whole insides shrink. His face had aged, though those eyes still blazed with life. He favouring his right leg, as a result, he explained, of carelessness around a land mine whose shrapnel had shattered his tibia, which he didn't mind so much, he insisted, except that it would ruin his dancing style. What was worst, though, was the air of profound sadness that hung around him like a thundercloud. It lifted a little after a few days, though he still refused to talk about where he had been and what he had seen. 

I know he felt bad about keeping me in the dark though, bad enough to whisk me off to Paris for a week. It was, he said, the least he could do to repay me for my for my patience and forbearance. It was the most precious week of my life and I was dizzy with joy and love. Arm-in-arm we strolled through Montmartre, breakfasting on _croque monsieur_ in the pavement cafes. We found quiet corners of the Pere Lachaise cemetery and made love in the sunshine amongst the long grass and the great and good of French culture. We ate _couscous_ and _fruits de mer_ and _saucisson_ and washed them down with champagne, and got roaring drunk and stumbled giggling through the _Rive Gauche_, and made love again and again in our hotel room before lying entwined through the long watches of the night, bathing in the warmth of our love.

He was gone again when I missed my period. When the doctor confirmed that I was pregnant my body was torn between the shivers of thrilled excitement and a heavy sense of dread and foreboding. To have John's child was everything I could have wished for, yet I was terrified he would never see his child. He did though. I wrote to him at the PO Box number with the news. Weeks of silence passed, and then I had a letter. He was leaving the forces.

So, John was with me, holding my hand as I screamed through a long and difficult labour, sharing the joy of the tiny infant who clenched his fists and glowered at the world with his father's eyes before he was more than a few days old. John, I had long decided, would be a great man, but William would be more than up to the inheritance, ready to assume his mantle when the time came.

The time would come before any of us could have realised. John brought his usual whole-hearted delight to his role as parent. With endless reserves of patience he took his turn with his son when he was fractious in the small hours. He changed nappies without needing to be asked and without squeamishness. But somehow I knew deep in my heart that it really was too good to be true, that John was restless amidst all this domesticity and felt keenly the call of the wild.

It didn't surprise me, then, when he announced that he'd been asked to join a team of Oxford archaeologists on a dig in Alaska "just to protect them from the polar bears", as he put it. There was a twinkle in those extraordinary eyes though that told me there was something else involved. "Actually", he confided, "and don't you dare ever let on that I told you this, there's a matter that needs to be followed up before the security services get wind of it, and I've been asked to be involved wearing my geophysicist's hat. The archaeologists don't know it but there's some kind of anomaly up in the high Arctic, and I'll be using them as cover while I try to find it. It's been part of Inuit mythology for centuries, a gateway into the spirit world so they say, but some evidence has come to light that suggests there might be a grain of truth in it. If there is something, it would be as dramatic as finding intelligent life on Mars!". 

Though he was smiling, his blue eyes flared as if to tell me to keep this information strictly to myself. There was no resisting him in this mood. Much as I yearned to beg him to stay with us I knew that he was keyed up to go like a racehorse straining to burst from the stalls. This would be the biggest thing he would ever do. I drove him to Heathrow myself and prayed silently through stinging tears that half- blinded me as I waved him off to Anchorage with the baby in my arms.

If I didn't have William's needs to attend to I would have just shut myself away with my desolate aching. As it was I spent hours crying. It felt as though something had been ripped out of my inner being. Then the first letter came a couple of weeks after he left, from Fairbanks. Bless him, it came like a burst of brilliant sunshine after a thunderstorm and so light-headed was I that I held baby William in front of me and danced a waltz around the kitchen. Oh how I hoped that William would be a dancer like his Dad! I felt the smile on my lips would stretch from Portsmouth to Poole and I couldn't turn it off. For this was my old Johnny again, not the curt and apologetic Major Parry of his Marines days but a letter full of love and infectious enthusiasm for his project that even overcame his frustration at the needless delays.

There was nothing then for a month. I guessed he had gone up country and the Alaskan postal service wouldn't have been exactly efficient, and when two letters came at once it was no surprise. I had to laugh at first - one of them was addressed from Colville Bar, which sounded more like a pub on the Portobello Road than an isolated Arctic outpost. But then something made the cold sweat break out all over my skin and the hairs on my neck stand on end. "Bring you back a trophy from the spirit world", he wrote. And "I love you forever" with a devastating finality that told me he wouldn't be coming back. "No!", I wanted to scream at him, if only there were any chance of being heard. The joke had gone too far. This spirit world was becoming too real and too serious and it chilled me utterly to think of it. I wondered if there was any way at all I could stop him. But the letter was dated 24 June and it was now well into August. Wherever he was planning to go, he'd gone there long since.

August turned into September and then October, and the leaves turned golden and blew into drifts in the autumn gales, and day after day I prayed in vain for a letter in the post. And then the newspaper men came.

All contact had been lost with the survey station. The whole team was missing, believed dead. Would you like to describe your feelings for our readers, Mrs Parry.

My feelings were those of someone standing alone on an Arctic ice-floe in a bikini. How the hell could I find words for my feelings? On the surface my skin was burning with rage at these men who cared nothing for a woman left to bring up a toddler on her own, only for selling more newspapers than their rivals. Underneath there were no feelings, only an all-enveloping numbness spreading through my organs to the very tips of my limbs. I did my best to smile sweetly, and I made them a cup of tea, and I let them take photographs of me and the baby. Anything to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

It took a week for it to sink in. My Johnny, the great man, father of my child, would never, ever, come marching home again. Not until after that loneliest of Christmases did the tears dry up enough to let me feel able to grit my teeth and set about the grim business of being a single mother in leafy, conservative Winchester.

Five years of gritty struggle passed before the dreams began.

They came spasmodically at first. I'd wake up in the dark, sweating and shaking, convinced I'd heard John's voice whispering my name. The first time I dismissed it as a one-off fancy. Then it came back, more and more often. Always the voice whispering "Elaine! Can you hear me?", and then I'd wake.

I got used to it. It was just that I missed him so much, I told myself. Once when the dreams came I didn't wake up fully. I lay in a sleepy daze while he called, and I knew he was calling though I was awake. I found myself answering "John? Is that you? This is Elaine". What happened next brought me fully awake.

"Thank Christ, Elaine. Can you still hear me?".

And though it seemed I was wide awake, the voice was so real in my head.

"Elaine! Listen to me! Have you still got my letters?"

"Yes", I thought back. "What is this?". From time to time I would get out the green writing case and read through John's letters, weeping all the while. They were all I had. For some reason there had never been any photographs, not even a wedding album.

"Then you've got to destroy them!"

What was happening to me? I was wide awake and having a conversation in my head as if I was on the telephone. "But I can't, John!", I replied. "They're all I've got!". This was John's voice all right, speaking through my head, even if there was a note of harsh urgency to it that I'd never heard before. That just added to the paradox.

"Elaine", said the voice, "listen to me carefully. I know you're not going to believe any of this but I need you to try. For your sake, for the boy's, for the whole bloody world's sake. I love you Elaine! I'm alive. But I'm in another universe. I have no other way to reach you".

My mouth opened and shut as I attempted to find words to respond. But none would come. This was just silly, surely? But how could I be dreaming something so solid, so substantial?

"Elaine, can you still hear me?"

"Yes", I thought, trembling all over.

"Good. There was an anomaly all right, a gateway to another world. Not a spirit world, one with people just like us. Well, almost. The anomaly wasn't quite where we thought it was, must have shifted. We walked through it without realising and by the time we knew what had happened it was too late. There was no way we could find our way back".

It occurred to me then that if I was really imagining all this detail then at least there was a career for me writing science fiction.

"Look, it would take too long to explain darling. But just destroy the bloody letters. You must!".

That was it! By making a mighty effort of will I closed down my mind. Just like slamming down the telephone, I thought. I took the writing case from the bedside cabinet and pulled out the flimsy letters. I read them through again through a film of tears, and considered setting light to them.

It was too ridiculous a notion. Putting the letters back in their case, I took them through to the spare room, where I slipped them into the compartment in the side of the old sewing machine.

The dreams came more frequently and more insistently now. I tried my best not to respond to them, to resist them. Sometimes it was John's voice again, admonishing "have you destroyed the letters?" or "Trust nobody!" or "Don't let them have them!". More often now it was pictures. Over and over again, a landscape with snow on the ground and great conifer forests, huts beside a great river, or men with round yellowish faces and black hair seeming to gaze uncomprehendingly right into my eyes.

The visions were no longer confined to the night. They began to follow me by day too, in the supermarket, on the bus to Southampton, everywhere I went. More and more there was a new sensation, as if I was dropping from high in the air towards a lake or a river, swerving at the last instant and soaring into the sky again, as if I were riding some monstrous roller-coaster. And I sensed increasingly that I was being watched, every minute of the day, awake or asleep.

Sometimes John would be dancing with me again. That would have been sweet if I had any understanding of what was happening. Sometimes, too, the voices and visions would stop, for a week, a whole month even. At those times I could relax. These were times when I needed to make a special effort to pay attention to William, because I knew I was neglecting him. He was turning into an introspective, brooding child, old before his time, losing his innocence prematurely like one of those poor youngsters who are burdened with the care of an incapable parent. Which is what he was, if only I would admit it.

Then, inevitably, the waking dreams would return, and then I knew I was slipping deeper and deeper into the abyss of madness, clinging to reality by my cracked and splitting fingernails.

The men first came two years ago. William was twelve by then and was in effect my full-time carer. I thought the men were journalists at first, but they just demanded gruffly to know where John was. They weren't police, because when I asked them for identification they barged past and pushed me into the living room. All the time John's voice was screaming in my head "Tell them nothing!" as if he knew what was happening - he did know what was happening! - and all I could do was sob helplessly. William must have heard me because he came charging into the room screeching at the men to leave me alone. They just laughed at the little lad but all the same they got up and left. William was his father's son all right. Only twelve he may have been but he had those blue eyes that could blaze furiously at anybody who stood in his way.

I don't remember anything after that. Not until I found myself sitting sharing tea and custard creams in Mrs Cooper's sitting room, with the piano through the wall and the voice in my head, now soothing, saying "Hang in there Elaine!". And a whole new vision I hadn't had before. I seemed to be high in the sky again, but not falling, not soaring. It was as if I was drifting, no, being blown across a bizarre landscape of flooded rivers and forests and flat empty fields of snow and ice. If you've ever seen that final sequence of 2001 A Space Odyssey then you'll have some idea, only there was no ethereal music, only a silence that made my ears ring.

Later, when I'd been with the old lady about a week, it was a weekend I think because I'd been on my own mostly and the piano had been jarring and jangling all day, the voice came back with an explosive ferocity I hadn't heard before. "William!", it said. "What in the name of creation is William doing here?". Almost in the same instant I felt a stabbing pain in my chest that made me cry out and brought Mrs Cooper hobbling through the door wearing her look of kind concern. But the pain passed, and in my head there was a peaceful quiet. No voice, no visions. As if a great stone had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.

I slept soundly that night. Deep, dreamless sleep such as I hadn't known for years. I slept well into the morning and woke feeling refreshed and so much younger. I thought about William and realised just how little he had been in my thoughts lately. Where was he anyway? Mrs Cooper told me he'd said he had to go away for a few days. I should go home, I thought. I thanked Mrs Cooper for her kindness and patience, and apologised because, to be honest, I felt pretty stupid. 

There was a new front door. One of those the police put up after a raid. My key didn't fit. I rang the doorbell, twice, but there was no answer. Round the back I was relieved to find that door intact, and my back door key still worked. Moxie the cat rushed in with me, miaowing urgently. I called out but there was no answer. Somebody had left the hallway unnaturally clean and there was a reek of disinfectant. Not William, I could be sure of that. Somebody had been here. I ran upstairs to the spare room, checking for the green writing case in the sewing machine.

It was missing.

I began to shake with panic and rushed around opening drawers all over the house in case it was somewhere else, knowing this was silly and there was no reason why it should be. My face was burning with the blood that rushed through it, my skin was clammy and my heart was racing. I had to sit down and collect myself.

Forcing myself to make a mug of tea, I sat at the kitchen table and tried to go through things rationally. The really sensible thing would have been to call the police, but some internal delicacy told me that was not a good idea. "Trust nobody!", John's voice had said. He'd also told me to destroy the letters but I hadn't and now it was probably too late, but at least I could follow the first advice. It was possible that William had taken the writing case to put it somewhere safe. It didn't seem very likely but it was the only hope I had to cling to. And where was William anyway? He had my credit card, I knew. He couldn't use it in a shop but I let him use it in cashpoints and a call to the credit card company might tell me something. One hundred pounds drawn from an ATM in Oxford five days ago. That was hopeful, it didn't sound like the card had been stolen anyway. So William had been in Oxford - of course, John's solicitor! It would make sense to take the letters there for safety. I dialled Alan Perkins's number and let it ring for a while before I realised it was Sunday.

When I finally did speak to Alan Perkins the next day, he said he hadn't seen William, though William had called him a week earlier, and no, he hadn't taken charge of a writing case or any letters. That was a blow. He did say that a man with very pale hair had been in the office asking about William. That made me shudder. I could hardly fail to recognise the man who had barged his way into the house. 

So, it was the police after all. Yes, a boy answering William's description had been seen in Oxford making enquiries at the Institute of Archaeology. They were looking out for him at the request of the authorities as a material witness in a death. That really made me shudder with fright. No, they weren't at liberty to say which authorities had made the request, which had been firmly withdrawn two days later anyway. 

William's trail had led to Oxford, then, and had gone cold. It seemed as though he had already followed in his father's footsteps. He'd vanished from the planet. An icy chill spread through my body. Never mind not trusting anybody - I had no trust in reality any more.

Still, the voices and the visions which had haunted me were silenced. Every three months the solicitors transferred money to my account, so I had enough to live on, and I took a job as office manager for a charity so that I could go through the motions of living a kind of life. But with both husband and son gone it was a hollow life. I think I preferred the voices to the cold and sullen routine. Everything seemed empty.

Why am I writing all this? Because everything was so extraordinary, and then it was so pointless. And the tale wouldn't be worth telling, but for what happened just two days ago. Two years after William went missing.

The phone rang. "Hello, is that Mrs Parry?", a woman's voice with a gentle Irish accent asked. I said I thought it might be. The woman giggled nervously. "My name's Doctor Mary Malone", she enunciated as if picking her words carefully. "I have news about your son, Will".

It took a few seconds to register.

"Mrs Parry?", the woman asked, "Are you still there?"

Not the voices again, I thought. But this was a real telephone.

"Sorry", I said, "Did you say you were a doctor?"

I heard the nervous giggle again. "Sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you. I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a doctor of philosophy. A physicist. Will's not ill, he's safe and well and with me here in my flat in Oxford. Are you all right?"

I had nothing left to believe in. I didn't care if I ought to trust this news, it felt like a message from heaven. My head was swimming.

"I'm fine", I stammered. "Where the hell has William been?"

The woman sighed. "Ah, well", she said, "it's a long, long story and you are never going to believe it in a million years. He's been through a bad time. But the important thing is, he's safe and he's well and he's in my tender care, and he's worried about you, and I've told him to sleep. Better leave it a day or so though. Shall we say Saturday?"

"I'm not sure there's anything I wouldn't believe any more", I said. "Sure, give me your phone number. I'll see you and Will on Saturday then!"

My feet seemed hardly to reach the floor. I felt as if I'd emerged from a long, long tunnel into the sunshine again. Almost sensing John's arms round me I waltzed around the kitchen. I'd known so little hope in the last few years I didn't know whether I could believe in this. But I wanted to, how I wanted to. And William has come into his inheritance. He's assumed his father's mantle.

But oh, John, my darling Johnny. How the ghost of you clings!


End file.
